


Choice

by fallenidol_453



Series: Foresight [2]
Category: Valdemar Series - Mercedes Lackey
Genre: Don't copy to another site, Gen, Not Beta Read
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-29
Updated: 2018-12-29
Packaged: 2019-09-29 13:22:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17204147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallenidol_453/pseuds/fallenidol_453
Summary: Something else is approaching, and it’s not a vision: her thirteenth birthday.





	Choice

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own the Valdemar series. All rights belong to Mercedes Lackey. Any mistakes to canon in here is entirely my fault. I'm just here to (tentatively) play in the sandbox.

Camil has visions on and off for the next few years, none as grisly as the aftermath of the raid. She can’t explain half of them; they involve people she’s never seen or met or events she knows she’ll never see outside of her Steading. She still tells no one of what she sees.

But something else is approaching, and it’s not a vision: her thirteenth birthday.

She doesn’t doubt Father has arranged a marriage for her, with a good dowry attached to her name. What would happen if she had a vision while married? She’d never be able to lie to her husband if he demanded an explanation. Worse, he might beat her if she didn’t give one. She’s seen some of the bruises other Underwives carry; she doesn’t want them.

There… was the Goddess, as well. She could claim to have a calling to serve the Goddess as a Servant. There would be no marriage for her, and no fate to birth baby after baby until death. She could receive her visions in the safety of the cloister walls and pass them off as divine messages from the Goddess.

But could she leave her family behind? Her sibs? The other Underwives?

At the same time, she didn’t know what awaits her in the temple. For all she knew, life within there could be more restrictive than life in the Steading now—or easier. Worse, she might never leave the temple until she died.

She thinks of the Underwives married to her father, with their pregnant bellies and occasional bruise. She could die like Underwife Rea, her screams filling the house as she labored to birth a breached son who didn’t survive a week. Firstwife Dali had almost died from childbed fever when Camil was six. She’s too young to remember her mama, who is such a faint figure in her mind she might as well not exist at all. Did she want that?

She buries deeper under her blankets and makes up her mind on her decision.


End file.
